Victory

[Victory]

Terry, over in the Computer Moderation thread you said (emphasis mine):

Our style of games required a critical mass of players. SuperNova regions had a minimum of 150 players (I think) to start a game. Victory had a game setup processed at exactly 40 players, etc. To be an epic space conquest game you needed to have a lot of people to form alliances, bump into each other, etc. If the game was to live for years and years it required a lot of people to start with ([since few wanted to join if they are years behind the original players in technology).

I was wondering, from a game design perspective, what were some tricks designers used to alleviate those issues? If we look at modern games, mainly MMOs, we see they use a ladder of "levels" to climb until reaching some level cap, where everyone is more or less equal. Of course then they run into the problem of creating enough content to keep the top levels interested.

From what I've gathered from reading about these games, it seems that they (SN, SNROTE, Starmaster, etc.) didn't employ an artificial cap; that is, a position could grow unbounded. Obviously new positions couldn't be near older, more established positions, so were newer players just destined to be forever behind and forever alone in a relatively unpopulated portion of the map/galaxy/universe?

SuperNova solved this problem by waiting until we had 150-200 players ready for a game. Then we set them up in a galaxy and off they went. When we got another 150-200 players organized another region was created.

In SuperNova when a given region whittled down the players enough it was possible for them to create a wormhole into one of the newer regions. This wormhole could only transport a small amount of material (ships, troops, colonists, etc) and the empire could then move into a new region as an Elder Race. They had an advantage in technology (usually only 6-12 months) but a horrible lack in their production capabilities. They could then form alliances with the powers that be in that new galaxy or just try to invade it.

StarMaster separated the galaxies on XYZ coordinates. One galaxy (the Central) was at 0,0,0 and another (NorthEast) was at 200,200,0 (for example). If ships could travel 9 parsecs a turn an unlimited supply of ships could eventually arrive in that galaxy for an invasion. This was more troublesome.

I'm not sure what SN:ROTE does. They definitely don't have enough players to create new galaxies and older players don't want to lose their stuff or edge, but the game wants newbies to play. Usually in this case they just put them in some corner of the galaxy and hope they expand enough with fellow newcomers that they turn out OK. A lot of times you can have them find technologic advances on alien planets that help them catch up. Since the older races can find those same items but they aren't very useful to them those items can be scattered around and help to narrow the tech gap a bit.

In general in these big PBM games the problems were solved by starting up new regions with oodles of players. This doesn't happen anymore and is tough for the GMs to deal with. People who have been playing BSE for decades don't want to lose everything when Phoenix starts up. New players don't want to be 20 years behind someone with no chance of catching up.

This was one of the selling points in Galaxy Alpha in that flier I linked to earlier in this thread. Old StarMaster players can join GA and keep some of their tech.

StarMaster had a lucrative niche selling existing empires to new players. When someone was going to drop they instead sold their position to someone else (who either plundered it or saved themselves years of work). I know of empires that sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars. This same thing goes on today in the online games and there are chinese companies that just farm for resources to sell to players in game as well.